Healthcare personnel may serve as responders during disasters or infectious disease outbreaks. To effectively respond to public health emergencies and natural disasters, healthcare professionals must engage in emergency preparedness and response activities. Empowering Nurses to Protect Themselves and Their Patients: Disaster Preparedness through the Seasons is the sixth webinar in the NICE Network webinar series. This webinar will address how nurses can be prepared to maximize patient safety, decrease occupational exposures, and prevent the spread of infections in a their schools, healthcare facilities, and communities during an outbreak or disaster.

Jade Bland-Slaffey has worked as a nursing education and practice specialist at the National Association of School Nurses (NASN) for the past year and a half. She has over 10 years of nursing experience in a variety of healthcare settings including inpatient, outpatient, day hospital, school health and--most recently--the non-profit sector. In this role, Jade oversees the association’s accreditation process for continuing education including the in-person online learning education and is the lead nurse planner for NASN’s annual conferences. She has led and contributed to NASNs revision of their School Emergency Triage Training (S.E.T.T.) program that launched in summer of 2017. This program highlights various disasters and response techniques to empower school nurses to be crisis management leaders in schools. Jade’s leadership and vision for focusing on the role of the school nurse in the S.E.T.T program, has enabled it to be a very popular and high demand program for NASN.

Marcia T. Podolec RN, CIC, COHN

Marcia Podolec has worked as a registered nurse since 1987.She started in the field of Infection Control in 1999 and one month into the job had a communicable disease outbreak related to a contaminated water source at the local county fair.Ms. Podolec became certified in Infection Prevention and Control in 2005.In 2011, she started working in Employee/Occupational Health and recently certified as COHN.